Balbix Launches Predictive Breach-Risk Platform

The company announces the general availability of its AI-based platform and reveals details of powerful outcomes achieved by design partners and early customers.

SAN JOSE, CA - Balbix today announced its official launch and general availability of its products. Balbix has built the security industry's first predictive breach-risk platform. Created for CISOs and CIOs, the platform calculates and visualizes an enterprise's cyber-breach risk and resilience across all devices, users and apps in its extended network. This system can be used to predict top breach scenarios, prioritize security mitigations and provide risk insights to prevent security incidents before attacks happen. The company also announced that it has received $8.6 million in investor funding from Mayfield.

"Building cyber-resilience is key in the post-hacked world where it's a matter of when, not if, an enterprise is hacked as the attack surface has increased through the adoption of IoT devices, BYOD and the cloud," said Navin Chaddha, Mayfield Managing Partner and Balbix board member. "Balbix resolves the critical need of CISOs to get ahead of the adversary by enabling them to understand their cyber risk and act to limit the likelihood and impact of attacks. Gaurav has drawn upon his entrepreneurial and deep security expertise and assembled a world-class team that has delivered the industry's first predictive and prescriptive breach risk assessment platform. I look forward to the journey and watching Balbix grow into a leading cybersecurity player."

A number of security firstsBalbix has built the market's first platform to use predictive analytics and AI to automatically measure breach risk and calculate resilience. Specialized sensors deployed across the enterprise continuously discover and monitor all devices, apps and users across hundreds of attack methods and indicators of business impact. This telemetry data is analyzed by advanced self-learning algorithms and used to build a bottom-up risk model. Within minutes of installing a few sensors, security teams can visualize their breach risk and use this to prioritize operations and projects.

Distinguishing industry-first features include:

Comprehensive risk heat-map: The system automatically monitors and analyzes the enterprise network 24/7/365 across hundreds of attack vectors to provide a real-time, searchable and clickable color-coded map of the enterprise. This helps over-burdened security teams prioritize mitigation projects by identifying areas of highest risk and surfacing actionable insights.

Predictive risk analytics: Balbix predicts breach scenarios by analyzing indicators of risk, factors that point to the future likelihood of occurrence of security incidents, e.g., user clickthrough behavior indicating high phishing risk. In contrast, existing products rely on indicators of attack or compromise based on security events that have already happened.

Effectiveness of mitigations and cyber-resilience: Balbix can compute the effectiveness of security mitigations already implemented and help prioritize planned security projects. The system also measures organizations' cyber-resilience -- the ability to limit the impact of security incidents.

Risk management is a growing market -- and top-of-mind with the C-suiteThe industry need for risk-management solutions, including analytics that predict the impact of business risk, is growing. According to a March 2017, Gartner report, "Definition: Integrated Risk Management Solutions," by John Wheeler, "Gartner also notes a shift to greater investment in risk-based approaches designed to respond more effectively to the growing cybersecurity and related digital business demands facing organizations today. With this shift in investment, Gartner forecasts that the IRM solution market will grow from $3.9 billion in 2015 to $7.3 billion by 2020, representing a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.4 percent1." We feel these findings validate a recent survey conducted by Balbix, which included 600 participants, including 250 from the Fortune 500, in which nearly 100 percent of respondents expressed concern about the rapidly expanding attack surface, while 87 percent said they were worried about lateral movement by attackers.

Automate risk assessment to reduce costsIn addition to proactively identifying risk and thwarting attack spread, Balbix addresses the increasingly relevant issue of security spend versus value with its automated risk-measurement capability. Enterprises with 10,000 devices typically pay around $250,000 for two penetration tests (pen tests) a year2. Relying on pen testing to find vulnerabilities or validate compliance is not ideal because the state of the enterprise changes every day. Balbix significantly increases the ROI on enterprise spend by offering comprehensive and continuous risk measurements at annual costs comparable to or lower than a single pen test.

"Today, it is incumbent upon us to assess our risk environment and protect ourselves from advanced threats targeting new technologies and devices, so that we don't suffer a breach, lose our intellectual property or get hit with compliance penalties down the road," said Abe Smith, director of enterprise security at Cavium, Inc. "Balbix allows us to get ahead of our threat environment by proactively identifying the most significant sources of risk in our network and prioritizing those gaps for remediation, enabling us to tightly -- and accurately -- focus our security spending and reduce costs."

Focus on cyber-resilience"By now it should be clear to anyone that attackers are able to routinely breach enterprises as environments become more complex and new threat vectors emerge constantly," said Anthony Belfiore, SVP and CSO of Aon, a leading global professional services firm. "It is imperative that businesses are able to fully understand and assess their organization's resilience against cyber-attacks, and the risk posture of their key third-party partners."

"Today, security teams are forced to rely on a set of reactive security tools, with no real way to predict how or where a breach is most likely to hit next," said Gaurav Banga, CEO and founder of Balbix. "It is very difficult for security practitioners to assess the true risk posture of an enterprise and communicate this to senior management or the board of directors. By automating predictive risk calculations and providing clear visualization, we let companies know what's most important, so they may channel their security spending where it's needed most. This is key to improving cyber-resilience."

Most enterprises are using threat intel services, but many are still figuring out how to use the data they're collecting. In this Dark Reading survey we give you a look at what they're doing today - and where they hope to go.

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